Conference calls play a significant role in today's business life. In conference calls, where some participants share a common conference room while other participants are at remote locations, the voice quality from participants speaking in the common conference room is often poor when using a standard conference phone with handsfree feature.
Professional conference rooms exist where each participant has their own input device, e.g., their own microphone, while audio output goes to a common room loudspeaker. In addition, conference systems are known that use desktop or laptop computers as audio and/or video terminals and that have a bridge server that can be configured to route output to a common output terminal such as a common conference phone.
WO 94/24803 describes a telecommunications network architecture which facilitates the handling of multimedia communications between any number of conference participants, who may have varying media communications capabilities involving one or more of audio, video, and data. A calling party and a called party meet each other in a virtual meeting room generated by the system. The telecommunications network architecture further comprises bridging resources to effectuate a mediation between different types of media.
EP 0 898 424 A2 describes a teleconferencing system for conducting a teleconference among a plurality of participants having workstations with monitors for displaying visual images and with associated audio-visual (AV) capture and reproduction capabilities for capturing and reproducing video images and spoken audio of participants. Furthermore, a common collaboration initiator exists for initiating a plurality of types of collaboration, e.g., data conferencing, telephone conferencing, video conferencing, etc. among the participants.